Story TIMe

Making Lemonade

If you were out at the Classic this year, you know we got lucky with the weather. We'd braced for the worst — told everyone flat out we were playing rain or shine, mentally prepared for a swamp — and then the sky just... cooperated. More than it had any right to. Funny thing is, even if it hadn't, I don't think it would've mattered much. Everybody showed up ready to make the best of whatever the day handed them. Lemonade stands and all. Felt almost too on-the-nose.

That attitude wasn't an accident, though. It's basically the whole reason this event exists.  I was thinking about our luck and this attitude over the last week and remembered this story.....

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One summer, my brother Ben planned a full guys' weekend down at my parents' lake condo — boating, pool time, the works. Turned out Tim, me, and one other guy were the only ones actually interested in playing golf that trip, so the three of us drove down early to squeeze in a round before everyone else showed up for the boating and pool portion of the program.

We played our eighteen, feeling pretty good about ourselves. Then, long story short, an incident happened and one by one, the rest of the crew started bailing on the boat-and-pool weekend — and once word got around that it might just be the three of us holding down the fort, our third wheel decided he wasn't signing up for a three-man all-nighter either, and headed home too.

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So there we were. Tim and I, a condo built for a crowd, and a genuinely alarming quantity of beer and snacks that somebody had very optimistically bought for eight.

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I was ready to cut our losses and drive home. Tim was not having it. He looked at me like I'd suggested we return the beer, and said we were staying. So we stayed.

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We made frozen pizza that was somehow both burnt and undercooked — a genuine culinary achievement I don't think we've been able to replicate since. We took it upon ourselves to personally address the beer surplus, with the kind of dedication usually reserved for actual jobs. At some point a guitar came out, and what followed was less "jam session" and more "two guys confidently mangling the same four songs on a loop until sunrise," but at the time it felt like we were absolutely killing it. We stayed up all night doing approximately nothing productive and had a very memorable night.

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It's still one of my favorite memories with my brother — not despite the weekend falling apart, but because of what he decided to do once it did. Most people would've called it a wash and gone home. Tim looked at an empty condo and a full fridge and saw a party of two.

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That's the lemonade. Not pretending the rain didn't happen — just deciding what you're going to do about it once it has. Tim was better at that than almost anyone I've ever known, and every year we run this thing, rain or shine, that's really what we're out there honoring.

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Thanks to everyone who helps us make lemonade!

Brian Goedde